“... the military preparations of the belligerents,2 the inability or unwillingness of the Great Powers to prevent the outbreak of war during the July crisis, and the first battles culminating in the German setback on the Marne, Tuchman concludes that faults in pre-war planning were responsible for the deadlock in the west; and that this deadlock, ‘fixed ...”

“... the soul – now had to be something not shared with any other animal. The great anatomist Richard Owen therefore claimed to find such unique structures, and long continued to maintain their uniqueness in the face of plain evidence from T.H. Huxley that they were present in apes as well. When this kind of rearguard defence finally failed, the debate ...”

“... results, I told him proudly, in the partition calculus he’d invented with his fellow Hungarian Richard Rado; I was also trying to settle a conjecture in infinite combinatorics – that there was no infinite descending sequence of countable order types. He ignored the first, questioned me about the second, thought for a few mom ents, then shrugged – which ...”

“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... The male armadillo also, as Buffon coyly puts it, ‘shows external signs of great progenitive powers’, that is, it has a penis two-thirds the length of its body. After observing, with some inaccuracy, that the armadillo’s shell was like that of a turtle or a crawfish, Buffon asserted that a good description, without definitions ... a particular ...”

“... Louise Bourgeois is one of the two pre-eminent sculptors working today; the other is Richard Serra, whose sculpture – single-minded, monolithic, public – offers the most striking contrast to hers in both form and content. Serra is Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog exemplified in heavy metal: Louise Bourgeois is the fox, an artist of many devices, to borrow a Homeric epithet which suits her perfectly ...”

“... her book, where the metaphysics of New Historicism stick out awkwardly. She invokes these occult powers apropos of the most sensational case in that career, Forman’s connection with the amorous projects of the Jacobean society beauty Frances Howard, who wanted to divorce her husband and marry James I’s favourite Robert Carr, and apparently procured the ...”

“... of the drug traffic; a century and a half ago, a card-carrying progressive would have sworn, as Richard Cobden did, by phrenology. When invited to lend our ears to what is obvious to all men of good will, phrenology should always come to mind. At an individual level, today’s Lib Dems are hardly rooted in the great continuities of history. A 1992 survey of ...”

“... architects of the war stand for, is being sent in to reach an accommodation with the status quo powers to pave the way for our departure.’ Behind these statements lies the belief that President Bush wants out; that the policy change announced on 15 November is real; that the timetable for ending the civil occupation by July 2004 is genuine. It’s a ...”

“... against the quiet obscurity that satisfied Emily Dickinson, her near contemporary. She married Richard Stoddard, a fervent would-be poet who was never to falter in his support of her aspirations, moved to New York, and cultivated bookish acquaintances. Money was always short, largely because she spent more than she earned. Much of her writing was directed ...”

“... his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in 1495, his Treason Act, which recognised that it was ‘ayenst all lawes reason and gode conscience’ to penalise subjects for treason that consisted purely of loyalty to the eventual loser. It remains in force. In 1662 it was ...”

“... month, quite legitimately in each case. Another example, more drastic, from the Conservatives: ‘Richard Benyon is Britain’s wealthiest parliamentarian, worth around £110 million. Despite having … applauded the government for “reforming Labour’s something for nothing welfare culture”, Benyon is paid £120,000 a year through housing ...”

“... another occasion, however, Coward does admit it. In 1955 he writes: Another book I am reading is Richard Aldington’s blistering, debunking attack on Lawrence of Arabia. I do not care for Richard Aldington’s mind, and his malice is a little too apparent; nevertheless quite a lot of it ’ as far as I have read ...”

“... the tradition by issuing one counterfeit version after another of events in Kosovo. Since Richard Holbrooke, Washington’s Balkan fixer, brokered a rickety ceasefire last October, Milutinovic’s arguments have come with a plausible lustre – he invokes the UN Charter, the sovereignty of member states and so on – but his latest observation, that ...”

“... in the same sense as the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly. While it will take some powers away from central government – in particular, policing from the Home Office and transport from the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions – as a ‘strategic authority’ its main job will be to centralise and coordinate the ...”